The Alaska Airlines plane that lost a piece of its fuselage midair Friday was not being used on long flights over water because a pressurization warning light had come on during three recent flights, the National Safety Board said Sunday. in the transport.
Jennifer Homendy, the board’s president, said it was too early to say whether the problem had played a role in Friday’s incident, which grounded 171 Boeing 737 Max 9 planes in the United States. “It’s certainly a concern and we want to delve into it,” Homendy said at a news conference in Portland, Oregon.
He said Alaska Airlines maintenance workers had been instructed to determine why the warning light had gone off repeatedly, but the work had not been completed before Friday’s flight. Instead, Homendy said, workers rebooted the system and the plane was returned to service, although the airline restricted its use on flights to destinations such as Hawaii.
He said the safety board was trying to get more information about what had happened during the three flights when the light went out, all of which had occurred since December 7.
Friday’s incident on Alaska Airlines Flight 1282, bound for Ontario, California, occurred at an altitude of 16,000 feet and forced the pilots to return to Portland International Airport shortly after takeoff. None of the 171 passengers and six crew members on board were seriously injured, but they were exposed to strong winds coming from the hole in the fuselage when the pilots made the emergency landing.
Authorities have focused their attention on a mid-cabin door plug, part of the piece of fuselage that was torn from the plane. Homendy said Sunday that investigators had recovered the stopper from the backyard door of a home in Portland. Door plugs are used to fill emergency exits that are not needed because the plane is configured with fewer seats than the maximum possible.
Ms Homendy also said there was no information on the plane’s cockpit voice recorder because the device starts re-recording after two hours, erasing previous data, and was not recovered in time. Homendy said the safety board, which has been pushing to extend the two-hour period to 25 hours, had conducted 10 investigations since 2018 in which the cockpit voice recorder was similarly overwritten.
“Cockpit voice recorders are not only convenient for the NTSB to use in investigations or the FAA to use in investigations,” he said. “They are instrumental in helping us accurately identify what was happening.”
Homendy said the decompression force during Friday’s incident opened the cockpit door, causing one of the pilots to lose a headset. The headrests came loose from the seats, the backrests disappeared, and clothing was scattered all over the plane.
Sunday was the board’s first full day of investigation into the episode, which has brought new attention to the Max plane and its troubled history. The Max was grounded worldwide after two Max 8 planes crashed several months in 2018 and 2019, killing hundreds of people.
On Saturday, the Federal Aviation Administration announced mandatory inspections affecting 171 Max 9 aircraft used by US airlines. Alaska Airlines, which has 65 planes, canceled 170 flights Sunday because of the order. United Airlines, which has 79 Max 9s, more than any other airline, said it canceled about 270 flights over the weekend.
